1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for recording and reproducing information onto and from a rewritable recording medium, and particularly to a method for recording and reproducing information onto and from a recording medium and managing a defective area in the recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, data is repeatedly recorded on a rewritable recording medium. Because of degradation of a recording layer or the like after repeated use, defective areas may occur, which can lead to errors in a data reproduction or recording process. Such defective areas may be caused not only by the degradation but also by scratches, adhesion of dust, fabrication errors, or the like. Therefore, in rewritable recording media, defective areas need to be managed in order to prevent recording or reproduction of data in defective areas.
In a digital-versatile-disk-rewritable (DVD-RW) format, for example, defective areas are managed by using a sparing area dedicated for data replacement and a sparing table for managing addresses of defective blocks and addresses of replacement blocks in the form of a table. The sparing area and the sparing table are located in a management information area of a universal-disk-format (UDF) file system.
FIG. 4 illustrates processing performed in the management. Reference characters A, B, C, and D in FIG. 4 indicate addresses of blocks in a DVD-RW. In DVD-RWs, defect information is registered on a block basis. For example, when blocks indicated by addresses of the reference characters C and D are determined as defective as a result of verification, replacement is performed by using a sparing area. Then, addresses of the defective blocks and addresses of blocks for replacement data in the sparing area are registered in pairs on the sparing table. In order to reproduce data, data access is performed by reading the replacement addresses in the sparing area in place of the addresses of the defective blocks with reference to the sparing table. That is, as shown in the table in FIG. 4, data access is performed by reading the block address A in place of C and the block address B in place of D. An example of the related art is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 5-135502.
In such a known method for managing defective areas, however, processing of a file system becomes complicated and the user area is limited because of inclusion of the sparing area.